


Advantage

by Blake



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Blow Jobs, But not much plot, Clueless Napoleon, Confusing Illya, Couch Sex, First Time, Gardening Illya, Humor, M/M, Napoleon's Apartment, Poolboy Illya, Porn With Plot, Possessive Illya, Power Play
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-27 13:56:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6287293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Napoleon gets Illya to help out with some house chores, things don't go exactly as he expected, and their working camaraderie does not disintegrate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If I don't post Chapter One now, I never will. This story happened because of a conversation about how Napoleon never actually bottoms in fic, because he's always topping from the bottom. It also came about from watching the tv show, and me developing this terrible trend of wanting to force the series' tropes onto the movie characters. (More to come on that.)
> 
> It also exists thanks to HurdyGurdy's wonderful beta skills. Thank you!

Napoleon sighs and kicks the thick root of one of the large, prickly weeds with the toe of his slipper. It doesn’t give. This is even worse than he was expecting.

Not so much _defeated_ as he is _determined_ to forget that the unpleasant discovery has happened at all, he takes the stairs back down from the roof. Just as he enters his apartment, the phone serendipitously rings.

“How did you get this number?” he asks idly, once Illya has performed an abrupt greeting and made it clear that this is an important business call.

“You gave me your card,” Illya replies, after a pause of disconcertment. Napoleon does so enjoy disconcerting Illya.

Inspired by that enjoyment, Napoleon comes up with a bright idea. “It must be safe to presume that you have already discovered my address, seeing as you’re an international spy now,” Napoleon says comfortably, speaking freely, seeing as he completed his sweep for bugs the day before, after waking from a long, long, post-travel slumber.

There’s another pause. It makes Napoleon wonder what would happen if he didn’t make room for those pauses and filled them instead. Would Illya let him talk for hours? Would he ever catch his footing enough to respond promptly, let alone cut Napoleon off? In the last few weeks of working with Illya Kuryakin, it has been so incredibly easy to take control of any and every conversation Illya starts. It’s like a tennis match—he’s a strong enough player that it doesn’t matter how well Illya serves; he’ll make the return every time. “Yes,” Illya finally volleys, sounding confused.

“Come on over. I’ll let the doorman know you’re coming.”

“I called to discuss the—”

“That’s why I want you to come over. To talk about business.”

“I don’t need to _come over_ , we—”

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure that my apartment is a more comfortable place to talk business than whatever digs our U.N.C.L.E.. has set you up with.”

And just like that, Illya agrees to come and hangs up the phone.

 _Love-fifteen_.

Napoleon isn’t surprised. He’s been able to get almost exactly what he wants from Illya since their first date together in Berlin, when Illya so charmingly upended a table. Poke him, his hackles go up. Prod him, he destroys something. Give him a watch, he throws away his career to save your life. Make enough suggestive comments, he starts staring at your lips when you talk. It’s easy.

When he arrives, Napoleon pours him a glass of lemonade and leads him up to the roof.

“You said we would talk about the protocol training,” Illya reminds him, filling out his pants quite nicely as he climbs the stairs ahead of Napoleon.

“No, I said we would talk about _business_ , and this just so happens to be my business proposition.”

Illya stops in his tracks to eye Napoleon suspiciously. Napoleon innocently sips his lemonade. “What business proposition.”

Napoleon gestures past Illya to the door at the top of the stairwell. “If you’ll just finish what you started instead of giving up halfway, you can find out.”

Illya snorts vaguely like an irritated horse but continues up to the roof. That’s the particular fun of Illya: he falls for Napoleon’s manipulations even when he _knows_ they’re manipulations. Napoleon hardly has to put any effort into subterfuge at all. Illya would probably eat out of his hand if he dared him to do it.

“Here it is,” Napoleon announces, once they’ve arrived.

Illya frowns beneath his sunglasses. “A plot of overgrown weeds. You have some important thing buried underneath?” Illya guesses, sounding unimpressed.

“Only a few culinary herbs and some tomato seedlings, assuming they’ve survived this long.”

Illya stares at him blankly for so long that Napoleon fills the silence. “When I left, I thought I was going to be coming back after a certain mechanic’s simple extraction over the Wall. I wasn’t counting on joining a whole new organization and working three more international jobs before getting back to my garden. I didn’t exactly hire a maintenance gardener for the five days I thought I’d be gone.”

“Of course, it is prime growing season,” Illya chimes in. “You grew very healthy weeds.”

Napoleon nods, looking out over the four-foot wall of thick green vegetation, flowering so cockily under the warm sunshine. “I’m amazed, Peril; I didn’t know anyone from the tundra could tell the difference between a dandelion and a daffodil.”

Illya folds his arms, shifting in his shoulders before giving up the point and serving again. “What does this have to do with business, or did you just want to show someone your pretty flower box?”

Smiling harmlessly, Napoleon looks up at Illya, and gets a face full of sunshine.

 _Love-thirty_.

Thirty minutes later, Illya has cleared a considerable patch of the garden. Four square feet, probably. Napoleon watches appreciatively as Illya bends at the waist to pull massive handfuls of weeds out at the root. He comes up with a half-dozen stalks in each fist, looking like some mythic agricultural folk hero, like some Paul Bunyan of urban gardening. He tosses them all— somewhat passive-aggressively—into a growing pile near Napoleon’s shoes. It’s fine, because Illya’s ass looks delectably firm when he’s bent over like that.

Napoleon is very well aware of his physical attraction to his newfound coworker. It’s one of the many things in the world he is curiously waiting to see play out, one of the countless lines he has cast that might get tangled or might catch something interesting or both. He can see it going a couple of different ways: either Illya rejects it all, can’t look at him the next day, and refuses to work with him any longer, in which case Napoleon would have the pleasure of watching Illya’s fury and discomfort bristle under his hand; _or_ Illya is so desperate for touch that Napoleon gets him to do whatever he wants, they play for a while before the tension disintegrates their working camaraderie, and then they part ways. Sure, Napoleon has enjoyed his time with this makeshift team the last few weeks, but he isn’t completely wedded to the idea of working for or with anybody but himself; at least with the CIA, he had the illusion of working for something he hated in order to buy his freedom, rather than actually dedicating his time and skillset to an idealistic organization.

Regardless, he has only _not_ made a move because—well, he’s not really sure why. For a while, it was because he didn’t want to get on Gaby Teller’s bad side. Now, it’s because he’s curious to see how Illya brews, maybe, or because he wants to know Illya’s game better before he plays him. There’s also the fact that Illya is cute in an infuriating sort of way, and Gaby is good company, and he’s not in any real hurry to break up their team, though he could certainly part ways without a bleeding wound of separation. Almost certainly.

Napoleon tilts his sunglasses down and looks over the brim to double-check, and yes, there is a dark patch of sweat-stain spreading across the lower back of Illya’s shirt. He’s wearing a black sweater, of all things, doing manual labor in this summer heat. Napoleon would give him a hard time about it, but he realizes that he gave Illya no warning whatsoever about appropriate attire.

“I’m sure I must have a t-shirt around _some_ where that wouldn’t split across your giant shoulders, if you want to borrow one,” he says.

Illya shakes his head and stands up straight to catch his breath. The jut of his ribcage stands out in the cling of his shirt and glistening sweat drips down into the turtleneck. Napoleon notices these things and contentedly chews on them, feeling somewhat like a dirty old man.

His attention now brought to the heat, Illya pushes his sleeves up messily until they dig into his biceps. Looking in Napoleon’s direction through his sunglasses, Illya asks, “Surely you have a t-shirt to put on yourself, so you can pull weeds from your own garden and not mess up your fancy shoes?”

“These are my casual shoes,” Napoleon protests. “It’s the hands I don’t want to mess up. I just cleaned my nails.” 

Illya squats down to pull out some shorter weeds that his efforts have uncovered. The muscles in his newly exposed forearms bunch nicely under sweat-slick, pale skin, which Napoleon wouldn’t mind getting his mouth on.“Clean nails,” he says sarcastically. “Makes it _much_ easier to reload gun.”

Napoleon moves into a new spot of shade and leans his hip against the wall. “Maybe not, but they are much better for…putting inside… _pretty_ things.”

Right on cue, Illya looks up at him with what must be a nasty glare, if the lines on his forehead are anything to go by. Napoleon smiles in his direction but to himself, pleased to keep his own private knowledge that Illya is the pretty thing he would most like to get his clean fingers inside of.

Napoleon admires each of Illya’s weed-pulling poses and techniques. Some highlight his backside and the splay between them where his pants are pulled taut against the crevice underneath, others feature the outline of his strong thighs and calves in his well-fitted trousers, while still others show off the length of his straight back and the hint of muscle on either side of his spine. All emphasize his strength, which Napoleon remembers in his bones from the second time they met, when Illya nearly choked him to death in ten seconds flat. Something warms inside his chest like a softened, shiny metal at the thought of having such a powerful beast under his control.

“I wish I’d thought to invite Miss Teller,” Napoleon says at some point. “I’m sure she would enjoy the view,” he explains, thoroughly enjoying the view, especially as Illya’s hackles go up. What kind of human being has hackles? It’s beautiful.

“Perhaps the view,” Illya says, returning to his task after a brief pause. “But that is all.”

Napoleon bites the inside of his cheek, wondering if Illya understands what happened half as well as Napoleon does. He doesn’t know how openly Gaby communicated with Illya, who makes open communication quite difficult, but he does know exactly how much dirt on the subject Gaby gave _him_ when he pressed for it (and liquored her up) last week: something about Illya not touching her, waiting for her to make all the moves, which was too much effort on her part and left her frustrated and ultimately happier with her own hand. At the time Napoleon heard this, his exact reactions were, first, an extreme (though not infrequent) surge of fondness for Gaby Teller, and second, the enticing thought that the poor boy would require a level of direction that Napoleon would be very eager and able to give.

By the time Napoleon’s tomatoes, stunted by the shade of much faster-growing weeds, have been unearthed and his herbs delicately untangled from their uninvited neighbors, Illya has streaks of dirt all over his face, neck, and forearms from all his attempts to wipe off sweat with his filthy, raw-red hands.

“Satisfied?” Illya asks, standing in the middle of the clear garden patch like a scarecrow—an ineffective scarecrow that Napoleon would want to sit directly on if he was light enough to perch.

“Not at all,” Napoleon murmurs, looking up and down the length of Illya’s body from behind his sunglasses. “But the garden looks good as new. Thank you.”

Illya crosses his arms and glares back at him, clearly aware that he’s being examined and extremely grumpy about it, yet completely unwilling to challenge Napoleon to own up to the examining.

“Once you take those to the dumpster,” Napoleon continues, pointing to the large pile of weeds on the cement, “I’ll cook you something to eat.”

“Where is this dumpster?” Illya bends down once again to take an armful of the stuff, sighing.

“Oh, down on the street, behind the building.”

Illya huffs at that, and drops the weeds in order to remove his sunglasses and glare outright at Napoleon. “I am trained KGB agent,” he says, his voice tight and close to breaking.

Napoleon steps forward and removes his own sunglasses before patting Illya’s endearingly tensed cheek. Illya leans slightly away from the contact but makes no other sudden moves. “And what else would a trained KGB agent spend his time doing in the capitalist mecca of New York City, besides helping a friend with some hard labor and fitting some exercise in while he’s at it?”

Illya growls a little under his breath but picks up his armful of weeds. “Planting bombs,” he responds eventually, walking to dump it all into an unused tree planter that Napoleon looks forward to seeing him carry down the stairs.

“Tying up and drilling CIA agents?” Napoleon calls after him.

Illya doesn’t respond, which very much suggests that he knows exactly what Napoleon is doing.

Eyeing the curve of Illya’s butt one more time, Napoleon decides today is as good a time as any to go for it.

 _Love-forty_.

Napoleon makes a curry with a recipe he got from a very nice girl he met on his last assignment in India. He makes it spicy just to see if Illya will sweat. He does sweat, but he also swallows without complaint. Napoleon drags his fork slowly out from between his lips, thinking.

Illya tries to talk to him about the New York office that they’re supposed to help set up, the mysterious training they’re supposed to complete, and whether Waverly is to be trusted when he promises Illya that he will not be ordered to remain in America for very long. Having already decided to reach for something tonight that will likely knock him down from his position in this new organization, Napoleon has little investment in wondering what the next week will look like for U.N.C.L.E..’s agents, so he answers noncommittally. It certainly doesn’t feel very out of the ordinary.

“Don’t you want payment for your help today, in the garden?” Napoleon asks, once he has cleared the table and they are both standing aimlessly in the dining room.

Cocking his head and folding his hands behind his back, Illya reminds him, “You said you would owe me a favor.”

“Sure, sure,” Napoleon agrees, nodding solemnly and walking toward Illya. He looks up at Illya’s scrubbed-clean, or is it flushed, face, and eyes the smudges of dirt he didn’t quite get off his neck. His pupils are flickering wide then tight, his nostrils flaring. Napoleon steps close enough to smell the sweat from Illya’s underarms, close enough that Illya has no choice but to smell him in return if he wants oxygen. “But if you wanted to cash in on that favor tonight, you could,” he says, pushing with words because that’s what unsettles Illya best. He looks meaningfully at Illya’s lips, which purse nervously as he swallows.

“Always, this teasing.” Illya’s voice is surprisingly low, and full of breath, exasperated.

Napoleon takes the last step in, looks right into Illya’s wide eyes, and says, “No, no teasing; if what you want is to get on your knees for me and open up, I _will_ let you.” He looks briefly again at Illya’s parting lips, takes in the sudden red flush on his cheeks, and feels the angered heat radiating from him, and it all slithers right down Napoleon’s body and settles happily in his thickening cock. “God damn,” he adds, lifting his hand to Illya’s cheek like he did earlier that day, but resting it on his jaw this time, thumbing over the plush of his lower lip and inspecting, surprised but not amazed that Illya hasn’t _done_ anything about it yet.

Until, suddenly, he _does_.

Napoleon’s head slams against the wall half a second after his spine does, and he feels the hot weight of Illya’s body against him before his vision comes back to him enough for him to see Illya looming over him. “You stupid man,” Illya grinds out, just as the white in Napoleon’s vision clears.

Two large hands grab Napoleon’s hips firmly, and he presses into them, barely catching the whimper in his throat as he gets suddenly, irrevocably _hard_.

Illya’s face hovers so close to his, darting from one side to the other, the air so thick it feels like their _skins_ can taste one another. Napoleon is stunned by the bursting reality that Illya is about to kiss him, and that he’s going to kiss him hard, and that he knows exactly how it’s going to taste because he can taste his breath right now, and it is hot and heavy, and Napoleon wants to suck it down. He tilts his face up, reaching for Illya’s lips with his own, thinking with half a thought that he hasn’t once considered the possibility of kissing Illya, but it’s really more like a quarter of a thought, because his mind is so consumed by the hot spurts of Illya’s uneven breaths on his lips and the taste of inevitability in the damp air between them.

But Illya drops suddenly down, leaving Napoleon’s mouth parted and dry. The sight of the top of Illya’s dirty-blond head in the vicinity of his navel hits Napoleon harder than he would have expected, and he lurches forward, only to have his hips pushed back against the wall by Illya’s single hand. The other hand, Napoleon shudders to see, and _feel_ , is undoing Napoleon’s trousers.

“Fuck,” Napoleon says, scratching at the wall as though he can make fists in it.

Illya says something in Russian, which Napoleon happens to speak just fine, but that completely eludes him at the moment, when the grip of Illya’s hands, the knit in his brow above his tightly shut eyes, the wet of his breath on Napoleon’s _aching_ cock are eloquent enough.

Then Illya shoves his hand up Napoleon’s stomach, dragging some of his shirt up with it to clear a patch of skin, and presses Napoleon’s cock up against that patch of skin by _pinning it there with his face_.

Napoleon makes a garbled sound as Illya says something else in Russian, and either Napoleon’s brain is malfunctioning or it’s some unknown dialect because all he can process about the syllables is the teasing slide of Illya’s lips against his shaft, the painful scrape of his moving jaw across the sensitive head of his cock, and the hot fall of breath against his stomach.

Hardly a moment to inhale, and Illya’s hand moves down again, his mouth wraps tight around Napoleon’s cock, and Napoleon smacks the back of his head against the wall once again.

Illya works him none too gently but with enough finesse that he must have done this before, or at least had it done to him enough and _thought_ about it enough to know what he’s doing. Napoleon melts and twitches under his attentions, and eventually gets back around to looking down at Illya’s bobbing head.

“Ahhh,” he sighs when he does look down and sees Illya’s face so intent, his lips so stretched and wet. Napoleon’s hips jerk up into the suction of his hot mouth, but they get nowhere, as Illya’s hand still holds him firmly to the wall.

Napoleon tries again, seeking more of the hot slide of Illya’s lips, but that grip stays strong, and he can’t move. Illya opens his eyes just to glare up at him in what is a possibly threatening, definitely stomach-dropping, manner. But when he pulls off to say some other Russian thing, he faces the ground between his splayed legs and murmurs with his lips cruelly sliding across Napoleon’s slit. He then sucks him down again to the back of his throat, and all the breath in Napoleon’s chest spills out noisily.

It’s over so fast—one moment, Illya wrapping his lips and tongue to suckle attentively at the tip, and the next, Napoleon choking on air as Illya stands abruptly to breathe _into his mouth_ while he jerks him with one hand to a fast climax that fills up the loose fist of his other, waiting hand.

Napoleon collapses, heaving, onto Illya’s shoulder, until Illya tips him back to lean on the wall and steps back. Looking with still-hazy vision at the stern set of Illya’s jaw, Napoleon marvels at how _good_ that mouth felt, how hard he came under it, how long it had been since he’d come so hard.

Well, _that_ was unexpected.

On his first normal breath, with Illya still looking down at him neutrally, Napoleon asks, “What just happened?”

Illya’s gaze darkens in a way that makes Napoleon’s breath hitch again. He looks Napoleon up and down, prompting him to tuck back in and fasten his pants. “We are even,” Illya says eventually. And the thing is, Napoleon can’t quite tell what that dark snag is in his voice, in his eye: anger, lust, resentment, apprehension.

Normally, Napoleon would reach out and try to touch Illya, poke and prod him until he could figure out whether it was anger, lust, resentment, apprehension, and what flavor and why and how. But he’s just a little unsettled by the fact that he really doesn’t know _what just happened_.

He reaches up into his own hair and scratches, trying to put pieces together. But before he has time to gather the pieces, Illya sits back down at the dining table, wiping his hands on the dinner napkin before putting his elbows on the table and leaning to cast a shadow over the bulge in his pants, giving clear signals that whatever just happened, it is over.

Napoleon is too unsettled to be disappointed. Sure, he’d like to know what’s going on with Illya, but as a self-centered guy, he’s more interested in figuring out what’s going on with himself first; he knows himself pretty well, but shutting up, letting himself be pinned down, and coming in under five minutes kind of came out of left field and will take some thought.

“I’ll bring out some dessert,” he says, sounding weak. He gathers himself to push off the dining room wall and take shaking steps toward the kitchen.

A thought crosses his mind, and he clings to it. “Do you play much tennis, Peril?”

Illya raises his eyes only slightly from the wooden surface of the table. “Never.”

“Pity,” Napoleon says, ease sinking deep into his bones. “I suspect you’d be fun to play with.”

Illya’s eyes narrow in directly on him, burning bright, only for a brief moment before he hangs his head again. Napoleon pushes the kitchen door open, chewing on a smile.

 _Game point_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay kissing! This chapter features an abrupt disappearance of the tennis metaphor because I'm just not that good a writer, despite HurdyGurdy's best efforts! Thanks again friend for the beta job :)

The next week is split between huddling with Gaby and Illya over documents at a round table and arranging and rearranging inventory that Waverly sends to the fully installed but empty complex. Napoleon waters his plants in the middle of the night and presses coffee too early in the morning.

“This isn’t exactly the kind of Manhattan lifestyle I’m used to,” he tells Gaby one morning as they struggle to walk in a herd of other people in suits and skirts, all crossing the street to get to their jobs at the same time.

He and Gaby are split apart by rushing pedestrians and then reconvene on the other side of the crosswalk before jointly turning right. “It’s only temporary,” she says, sounding more like she’s saying _it had better be only temporary._

Napoleon catches sight of Illya, a head taller than the crowd and approaching from the opposite direction. His heart skips a beat when Illya glances up at him and the scowl on that soft face lightens a shade before darkening even further. “Don’t I know it,” Napoleon mutters.

The first five days of working pass with no time for socializing at all, unless Napoleon counts his chats with the clerk at the nearby deli. He starts to itch, and eventually his flask begins to sneak into his pocket and follow him to work. They test out so many weapons at the underground firing range that his ears don’t stop ringing when he goes to sleep at night They spend so much time watching slides in the dark that he feels like a kid spending solid days at the nickelodeon. He watches Illya when his eyes start to strain from the light of the projector, maybe even when his eyes don’t hurt at all.

He studies Illya for signs of discomfort after what happened in his dining room, but Illya still rolls his eyes in exactly the same fashion. He still looks at Napoleon’s lips when he talks, and his hands still shake when Napoleon’s words cut too deep—but not with any more severity than usual. It’s almost as though nothing has changed. It’s almost as though their partnership isn’t disintegrating.

A couple of times a day, Illya will cock his head in a particular way, looking at Napoleon intently, considering, studying, with his face soft and absent of a smirk, and Napoleon will realize that he has been staring at Illya for a rudely long amount of time.

Sometimes he’ll look across the table at both Gaby and Illya, and it will strike him suddenly that _one_ of them knows exactly what he smells, tastes, and feels like at the junction of his thighs, and he thinks this underlying intimacy should be visible somehow; in those moments, he half-expects Illya to burst into a spontaneous blush.

In between lifting one piece of furniture and another, Napoleon will pull his flask out, and whenever the movement catches Illya’s attention, he will hold out a drink in offering. By Thursday, Illya takes him up on it, and when Napoleon takes a sip, he tastes Illya’s breath on the flask’s opening.

When the delivery boy brings the huge Russian language dictionary that Napoleon convinced Waverly is an office necessity, Napoleon pages through it on a break, sounding out syllables that aren’t quite what Illya said that night. When the mental _click_ happens, and he stumbles across what must be one of the words, he chokes on his sandwich, his dick twitches savagely, and his face blushes hotter than he knew it was still capable of.

By midmorning of the sixth day, they are merely waiting for Waverly to arrive. The three of them sit at the round table passing Napoleon’s flask around. Gaby spends the most time with it, which is only fair since she seems to have slipped into some unofficial, undefined management position and has therefore been doing most of the work. Illya is the only one of them who keeps his feet on the ground instead of on the table. When word comes in that Waverly will be delayed by two or three days, Napoleon takes his address book to the nearest payphone and secures himself company for the night.

But Illya tails him back to his apartment. God knows why he even bothers trying to be stealthy when he’s a foot taller than anyone else, and it’s broad daylight. Napoleon lets him follow, stopping only at the drugstore for condoms he doesn’t need, just to make Illya uncomfortable and, thus, make it clear to Illya that Napoleon knows he’s there. He imagines the furrowed brows, rolling eyes, and heavy sigh as Illya realizes that not only is Napoleon wasting his time with frivolity—he is _intentionally_ wasting his time with frivolity. He imagines Illya’s tensed jaw at the frustration of not being able to confront Napoleon _about_ the intentional time-wasting without ending this game…whatever game it is. A game that Napoleon will keep playing until Illya forfeits.

After a brief drink in his apartment, Napoleon brings some towels and glasses up to the swimming pool, since the girl he has invited over is a professional swimmer and will likely want to get right to business.

With dismay, he arrives to find the pool a complete wreck, just as the fire escape behind him rattles loudly. He walks over to the border of the roof and peers down to see Illya climbing somewhere in the vicinity of Napoleon’s kitchen window.

“In capitalist nations, we have these devices called _elevators_ ,” Napoleon shouts, bracing his arms on the cement railing and leaning at the waist.

Illya looks up sharply, almost losing his hat to gravity in the process. With his hand atop his head, he starts walking up the remainder of the stairs. “The elevator,” he says as he approaches, “was invented by a Russian, Ivan Kulibin.”

“Oh, how could I have forgotten?” Napoleon smiles down at Illya’s bent head, strangely warmed by the sense of reeling in this catch all the way from the street to the top floor. He steps forward to lend a hand as Illya gracefully hurdles the roof’s railing, even though his help is really not needed at all. His hand rests just inside Illya’s elbow for too long and for no reason.

“In Soviet Union,” Illya says, and it seems abrupt to Napoleon, who promptly withdraws his hand, “We have a device called a _roof_. Its function is to cover buildings, not to be a playground with gardens and swimming pools.”

“This isn't much of a _swimming_ pool, I’m afraid. A frog might balk at the scum and debris in there.” Planning as he goes, Napoleon leads Illya toward the water with his hand low on Illya’s back. “Which is why I was just hoping you’d drop by. See, I have an acquaintance coming over for a midnight swim—”

“You want me to clean your swimming pool,” Illya accuses.

When the man’s right, he’s right.

Before he agrees, Illya gives him that even, considering, smirkless look that makes Napoleon feel as though he has been caught staring.

Napoleon does stare, once Illya has figured out his way around the pool’s skimming net and starts sweeping the leaves and windblown garbage off the surface. He watches Illya’s muscles tense and relax. He watches Illya’s facial expressions change in tandem with his rhythmic motions. He watches Illya’s clothes darken with perspiration, yet again.

He is just on the verge of suggesting some lewd reasons for why the Red Peril never shows skin, when he is silenced by the revelation that he cares how much skin Illya shows. Napoleon’s more carnal interactions with men have always been based on his power over them—the power of his attractiveness, the power of how much skin he’s showing. As years have gone by, he has learned to appreciate a good-looking youth, a kid who looks as he once did when he joined the Army and learned the value of a pretty face, but he has never pursued one with more than passive agreeableness. The pleasure he finds in men is in his ability to give them what they want in order to get what he wants, not in the admiration of their aesthetics.

But he has found Illya _beautiful_ since the moment he tried to stop a moving car with his bare hands. If Illya bloodied his knuckles on a brick wall, if he had Napoleon’s come smeared across his hand, if he took off his shirt—Napoleon would want to see every second of it, with as much investment as he has with the most beautiful women he has slept with.

Napoleon excuses himself and comes back with his swim trunks on, showing skin.

Illya is using the long brush to sweep the green scum off the sides of the pool when Napoleon steps into the warm, significantly cleaner water. “Gotta say, Peril,” he says once he’s waist deep. He can feel Illya’s eyes on him without looking. “I’m beginning to wonder what brought you here, to my apartment, on this sunny day, with a whole city out there for you to explore, sabotage, or seduce.”

His face rather unreadable behind his sunglasses and in the reflected glare of the water’s surface, Illya says curtly, “You do not ask. You wonder.”

It’s not the reply Napoleon is expecting, but it is true. “You wouldn’t answer with the truth if I asked,” he speculates.

Illya’s jaw flickers even as he focuses intently on scrubbing the pool.

Napoleon sighs, descending into a loose, above-water breaststroke and passing by under Illya’s feet. “One theory I have is that you like being put to work.” Napoleon lets silence hover heavily over that statement. He bends his head to touch the surface of the water with just his lips in a way that could be idle or could be suggestive. He doesn’t mind however Illya takes it.

When he looks up, there’s a smudge of a smirk on Illya’s cheek, flickering in and out of existence under the refracted light. To say that it feels like a bullet in the chest would be hyperbolic, but it does feel like a slow-working immobilizing dart: the hard, pellet-like numbness, the spreading crawl of losing control of one’s own body, the sinking knowledge that things haven’t gone quite to plan. “Now I’m wondering why you’re smiling.”

A cold whip of algae-green water swirls around Napoleon’s feet as Illya finishes a stroke and says, “Might be because _you_ are the one who likes to _watch_ me work.”

Napoleon drifts on his back away from Illya. “Is that why you’re smiling or why you came?” he asks, not certain which answer he’s prodding at but hopefully using the disadvantage to ruffle Illya’s feathers rather than stewing on it himself.

But Illya snaps right back, “Why I came, obviously,” and Napoleon is adrift, his toes and knees peeking above the water.

He squints his eyes shut against the sun. “I’m beginning to think you want to recreate our evening last weekend,” he says, while his mind quickly searches for clues he could have missed that would have warned him that Illya is the kind of man who not only enjoys the company of other men but also _lets_ himself enjoy the company of other men, which, in Napoleon’s experience, is a whole different ball game. Biding time, he flips over and starts swimming forward again. “I wouldn’t blame you; the curry was very good.”

Something cold touches his stomach—the metal pole of the broom, which Illya has slid underneath his body and is using now to pick him up like a kid saving a drowning ladybug with a stick. Affronted, Napoleon stands up and frowns at Illya, before realizing this was exactly what Illya wanted him to do. “ _You_ are the one who wants to recreate last weekend,” Illya accuses through a smile.

Rather stunned by Illya’s openness, but also clueless as to whether it’s actually openness or some elaborate bluff, Napoleon is left with no option but to acknowledge the fact that, no bluffing, he _does_ want that. So he says nothing and walks through the waist-deep water to where Illya is standing. He extends his arm up, squinting into the bright blue sky again and asking, “Help me up?”

The vague, backlit shape that is Illya doesn’t move except to point to the deep-end ladder a few feet away from them. “There is device called _stairs_.”

Napoleon keeps his arm extended, his hand in a graceful curve that’s waiting to be grasped. “I don’t _want_ the stairs.” He looks up Illya’s body, and he wants to see it bend under the plainness of his words, wants it to shake with the trembling murmur in Napoleon’s chest, wants it to give. It’s just a matter of time.

Finally, as Napoleon was certain he would, Illya releases the broom to grab his hand, and bends to start hoisting him out of the water. Napoleon pulls himself up with a grunt and a dropping sensation in his stomach. Still semi-suspended in the air, he uses his free hand to snatch the sunglasses off Illya’s face and toss them aimlessly. He looks into Illya’s startled blue eyes just as he gets a foot braced against the rim of the pool and pushes, tipping backward into the pool and dragging Illya with him.

Even in water, Illya’s body weighs heavily on Napoleon’s as he lands on top of him, all wet fabric and flailing hard muscles against Napoleon’s slick skin until Napoleon slips away from under him to surface. He stands and pushes his wet hair back from his face, feeling some kind of distant awe as he watches Illya sputtering and dripping three feet away.

The calm only lasts a second. Suddenly, Napoleon’s heart leaps to his throat as Illya dives for him, pressing him through the turbulent water with the force of his own body like Napoleon weighs nothing. Napoleon’s eyes shut, and he thinks of dragging Illya up from drowning, of the riptide that almost swept him away on his first family trip to the Gulf, and of the redheaded bombshell a few years back who he let choke him with her manicured fingers until he came.

With a sharp bump against the top of his spine, he is suddenly no longer floating; he is caged between Illya’s hands clutching the pool’s rim on either side of his head, Illya’s knee pressed between his thighs, Illya’s chest heaving against his, Illya’s breath all around him, and, when he finally looks up, Illya’s eyes drilling icily into his.

Irrationally, Napoleon’s lips throb with wanting to taste him. It feels like there is nowhere he can go, so he lets his arms drift until they settle across Illya’s ribcage, losing his breath when he feels slick skin against his hands where Illya’s shirt is loose and billowing in the water’s current. He presses up into the thickness of Illya’s thigh, already hard and wanting and blown away by how badly he needs this to happen.

Using his hands on Illya’s back for leverage, Napoleon tilts in to get his mouth on Illya’s parted lips. But Illya curves his back in equal measure, an evasion. Napoleon licks his lips in frustration and presses their chests closer, edging forward.

Illya _laughs_ at him—a single, short, chuckle, as is his way—and pushes off the wall, backstroking to the ladder in a fucking _flirtatious_ manner that fills Napoleon with childish outrage.

Treading water, Napoleon forces the panicky, desperate churning in his stomach to settle into its place and gathers his breath. “Why did you come here, Peril?” He sounds only slightly too upset for his liking. He watches sheets of water cascading from Illya’s clothes as he steps out of the pool. He recalls Gaby hinting that Illya doesn’t take charge of things, and he could kick himself for the way his body seems to forget that helpful information whenever Illya and his mouthwatering breath are pressed up close against him.

He stares as Illya finally, finally pulls his sweater over his head, revealing pale skin stretched taut over what would have to be several handfuls of hard, smooth-edged muscle if Napoleon’s hands were on it. Napoleon’s fingers twitch underwater, and his throat goes dry. All he can see is Illya’s back, arms, and side, and he’s already imagining all the ways he can fit his mouth over it all.

“Because I like seeing your face like that,” Illya says. Napoleon lifts his gaze to Illya’s eyes, which are cast coyly over his shoulder as he wrings the water out of his shirt with movements that make his shoulders twitch invitingly.

Napoleon forces his mouth shut.

Before he can reply, Illya picks up a towel and continues. “The whole week, like this. You looking at me like you can’t stop.”

 _I can too stop_ is so, so far beneath him, so he settles on, “I like looking at pretty things.”

Illya’s face hardens slightly as he rubs his hair dry with Napoleon’s towel. Once his hair is good and spiky, he drapes the towel across one shoulder and walks in his sopping wet shoes toward the main staircase. “Like your swimming acquaintance,” he says, before opening the door and shutting it behind him.

This abruptly forces Napoleon to realize several things at once. One, he has a date set, and by now it must be nearly time for her to come over. Two, Illya would never walk shirtless on the street, which means he must be letting himself into Napoleon’s apartment. Three, Illya cleaning his pool made him entirely forget what he was having the pool cleaned for. Four, Illya’s hair looks perfectly grabbable when it’s half-dry like that. Five, well… He’s not really sure what he’s realizing; he just knows he’s figuring out _something_ , and it feels pretty big.

And six, he’s still treading water in an empty, half-cleaned swimming pool.

Once he follows the trail of water all the way down to his apartment, Napoleon opens the door, telling himself that it’s ridiculous to be anxious, when less than a week ago, Illya Kuryakin was bowing his head in shame at Napoleon’s dinner table.

When he walks in, Illya is sitting casually on his couch, even more dressed than he was a few minutes ago. He has put his wet sweater back on over his wet pants and wet shoes, and is dripping chlorine into the upholstery and probably soaking the cushions, and for some perverse reason, that makes Napoleon salivate.

After dropping his towel and Illya’s hat and sunglasses on the floor, he starts an approach, watching Illya’s body language remain relaxed even as his facial expression darkens. Napoleon feels shaky, his movements ruled by the tremor originating in his chest, but he remembers what Gaby told him about Illya, and he pushes onward.

He sits down on the couch, fitting within the border of Illya’s puddle and pressing their thighs together. Illya’s body tenses beside him, and he reaches for Illya’s wrist to lift it. He taps on the face of his watch a couple times, murmuring, “Still working,” while Illya’s fingers flex, the tendons of his wrist working under Napoleon’s touch. “There’s still some time before seven,” Napoleon comments. He crosses one bare leg over the other, canting his whole body inwards toward Illya. With Illya’s wrist still in his right hand, he reaches up with his left and slides his fingers into that spiky mess of hair. It’s so clean it squeaks, and Illya makes a low sound in his throat, either purring or growling in warning.

Even though none of this feels _quite_ right, Napoleon slides his hand down to rest on Illya’s jaw, to tug him closer. Just at the corner of Illya’s steady mouth, he says on an inspired note, “Maybe I can even convince her to let you stay.”

Lightning-fast, Illya is on top of him again, Napoleon’s spine once again bruising against something—the arm of his couch—and _this_ is why it didn’t feel quite right a moment ago, because _this_ is what feels right, Illya a solid and demanding weight on top of him. Napoleon’s breath gets caught in his throat, and his eyes get caught on Illya’s lips, and he should be tired of ending up just like this and getting nothing from it, but he isn’t.

“Call her,” is what Illya’s lips finally part to say, “and cancel.”

Napoleon makes himself meet Illya’s eyes, which are trained steadily on him. “What?” he asks, not getting what Illya is saying.

“Call your friend.” Illya’s voice is dark, and the humor is gone from his face. It’s a particular brand of Illya’s anger, the kind that leaks out vulnerability Napoleon doesn’t know what to do with. Napoleon shifts to take stock of where they’re touching, and there’s not as much contact as he thought—Illya is bracing himself with his knees between Napoleon’s, one hand at Napoleon’s side and the other on the arm of the couch. “Cancel your date,” Illya says, reminding Napoleon that they were talking in the first place.

“I don’t—” he starts, before realizing he doesn’t know how to finish. It hasn’t even occurred to him to cancel his date. It’s not something he does often—not on principle, but because it feels like giving up on a perfectly good opportunity. He doesn’t like to choose between having his cake and eating it, so whenever multiple opportunities pop up, he usually manages to fit them all in.

But none of that would make sense to Illya, who is staring down at Napoleon, not in a way that threatens bad things in exchange for the wrong decision (which Napoleon would have no problem standing up to) but in a way that promises good things in exchange for the right decision (which makes Napoleon’s skin tingle in the places where Illya’s freezing wet shirt drapes and shifts against his chest). In light of Illya’s inevitable lack of understanding, Napoleon’s thoughts about canceling dates seem abruptly irrelevant, and all he can think about is getting his hands under that shirt.

Wincing at the pain in his neck, Napoleon snakes a hand behind himself to the phone that sits on the side table. He grabs it off its cradle and draws it down, looking all the while into Illya’s eyes, which shift in color like an ocean with currents Napoleon can’t begin to predict. “Operator,” he starts. He drags one leg up, the one that’s between Illya’s, until his thigh is pressed up tight against Illya’s groin. Holding his gaze, he has the operator get him connected, gets his girl on the phone, and tells her there’s been a change of plan.

In the silence after, Napoleon holds up the receiver, offering it to Illya to hang up for him.

But the phone drops to the floor as Napoleon is swept and pinned flat on the couch with Illya’s hands on his side and neck, Illya pressing the air out of him with his whole body, and Napoleon’s hands moving to clutch at his shoulders while Illya kisses him deeply, surely, possessively. Napoleon shuts his eyes and licks up Illya’s breath and thinks with his entire self, _Oh_ , before melting away.


End file.
